On the benefits of being Heathen

[rayw69]

Originally posted by Blake
I'm becoming more and more impressed by staying Heathen/Pagan but whoring religions, like "Early game Free Religion", the effect of founding multiple religions is rather huge. And a new city can immediately be spammed by 3 missionaries for an instant 3 culture, which is pretty good for non-creative! (or no free artists), and you can build the shrines for the religions you focus on whoring and rake in cash too. Paganism is really quite powerful!

You're going to have a tough time spamming with missionaries without having built monastaries though. Which actually leads to one of the more interesting early game decisions that someone can make.

Imagine that you are the warmongering expansionist type. Your agenda is to eliminate at least one opponent in the early game, and create enough culture to solidify nice borders.

One strategy is to beeline to Monotheism, while stopping off for iron working. Then, switch to the organized religion civic, without picking a state religion. Then make another beeline for Theology.

What this does, is allow you to make missionaries of the 2 early religions (Judaism and either Hinduism/Buddhism) you have founded, without having to build monastaries. Assuming you have a source of iron, you are able to build swordsmen and axemen.

At this point, designate 1 city to produce missionaries/workers/settlers. The other cities should be making axemen/swordsmen.


(Note: Monastaries are cheap, so building them is NOT cost prohibitive. So you might be wondering: Why switch to organized religion? Why not just build the monastaries, get culture from them, and not pay the high civic cost of organized religion? My rationale is, I can build 3 missionaries for the cost of building 2 monastaries. So I am essentially switching to Organized religion for the purpose of trading the price of increased civic upkeep for 120 "free" hammers, which is the cost of building 2 monastaries. I'm also getting these 3 missionaries quite a few turns faster than I otherwise could. So any culture I am losing from not having built monastaries, is balanced by the increased cuture I am getting from having these missionaries built and used in cities faster.)


In about 20-25 turns you have a fighting force that should be quite formidable. You should have also been able to spread at least 1 of your founded religions to all cities, relying on natural spread to get the first religion in any new city. Some (or most or even all!) cities may have both religions by this time. All the while, you are exempt from the culture penalty of choosing a state religion, which helps establish borders. You're probably just a few turns away from Theology when you start attacking with your axeman/swordsmen.

Once you discover Theology, you are presented with a few options, depending on how it it has all played out.

1) Stay with organized religion and no state religion. This is a good option if the war is still ongoing, and you think your current war machine is good enough to sustain the fight and win. Bonus points for this course of action if you were the first to discover Theology, since you can reap the benefits of discovering Christianity, and the +5 culture per turn in that city. Take that free missionary and use him to spread Christianity into the missionary producing city, and keep spreading it around to generate even more culture.

1A) Flip back to paganism and no state religion. This is an option that can be used in the above scenario, but you were not the first to discover Theology. You no longer have to pay the high civic cost of Organized Religion. Since you didn't discover Christianity, you don't have it to spread around. As all of your cities have religion by now, no need to build missionaries. May as well save the cost of running the civic. After switching back to paganism, use the missionary creating city to build monastaries if further missionaries are required.

2) Switch to Theocracy and pick a state religion. If the war is slow going, or you feel like rolling along for even longer, perhaps making war another Civ next, this is an interesting option. You're now getting +2 XP for all new troops, since you were careful to spread at least 1 of your religions to all cities. This comes at the expense of some culture gneration. But you are getting a +1 happiness to all cities to combat any war weariness. Your former missionary producing city is now free to make miliary units as well. Your war machine just got that much stronger. You lose some culture generation, but you've made the choice to take territory by force instead of by culture.

3) Stay with Organized Religion, but pick a state religion. If the war is about to be won, this is a great option. You lose out on some culture production, but presumably, your war has already gained you quite a bit of new territory, which reduces the need for this extra culture production. Since you no longer are at war, you can go into full infrastructure building mode, to take full advantage of the 25% speed increase in production when making buildings. You get +1 happy in all cities, and retain the ability to make missionaries without monastaries if necessary.


A big side advantage of waiting on choosing to state religion, is the ability to be more flexible in your choice. If a nearby ally happens to adopt one of your founded religions as their state religion, you are able to focus your missionary production on that religion, in anticipation of matching his chosen state religion when you eventually make the switch.

[Blake]

Yeah, I've found it's best to run a religious civic early, but later on if the roll of the dice ends up with several different religions spreading strongly though my empire it's better to switch to "early free religion" aka paganism+heathenism.

And I love building monastaries . 2 or 3 monastaries of each religion suffices (you can't have limitless missionaries anyway), and they are cheap.

I have run paganism all game (and that game was by far my strongest game so far, over double the nearest AI). I've also run paganism for part of the game before free religion. Both are pretty nice.

Paganism all game is especially good i find if you don't go for one of the 3 early religions. If you do go for an early religion, then a period of org and/or theo are good, but if you found more religions later it can be good to switch back to paganism. I appreciate that Paganism has low upkeep costs, helps pay for my expansion boom.